"We never consider the macro-scale economic condition when making business decisions. We don't think we can know, nor can anyone else. It's a conceit we have: We think nobody else can know better than we can. So we look at each business on its own."
- Warren Buffett

Take it down a notch

I'm worried about the heroinization of content and attention. There must be a better way to put it, but I don't know of any other word to use that suggests the kind of intensity of the addiction that people seem to have towards ever-more stimulation by talking, chatter, Internet buzz, and pleas for attention.

If all that matters is getting attention, then we end up rewarding those who are best at screaming -- not those who are best at thinking. A quick glance at what you probably see on your Facebook news feed will most likely confirm this. It's not like people are sharing more of their own meaningful thoughts...many, however, are sharing ever more of the ridiculous, the outlandish, and the extreme -- pictures and posts that other people generated and your friends share. I have friends who share nothing but the most loud-mouthed of political sentiments. Not their own, mind you, but carefully-packaged items generated by groups on both the left and the right, all designed just to be shared and to occupy more space in front of your eyeballs. And because it helps people to confirm their own political identities, there's no shortage of people willing to share those ready-made propaganda pieces in ever-increasing volume.

I don't think that politics is driven solitarily by what people read on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else online. But I do think that many of these sites are very good at causing us to let our guard down and feel like we're being addressed directly by our own friends on a one-to-one basis, not propagandized by organized groups. The result, I fear, is unhealthy...especially when it causes people to assume the worst of their fellow human beings.

Filling in for Jan Mickelson on WHO Radio this week, I ranged across a number of different topics, and some of those topics instigated feedback from listeners. Some of them espoused some pretty far-out views. And I don't really care whether people believe in things that are far-out, but I do care whether they believe that their opponents are well-intended.

Don't ascribe to malice what is at least equally explained by incompetence.

I look at friends and acquaintances on the left who think that the Republican party is out to beat every middle-class and poor person with a shovel and then chase them into the ocean. And I look at friends and acquaintances on the right who think that President Obama is a real-life Manchurian Candidate out to literally destroy America. The less these people have their opinions reinforced by thoughtless recitation of propagandistic memes on the Internet, the better off we'll all be.

In many ways, I'm convinced that the present administration in the White House is insufficiently competent for the task of running the nation's business. But I still assume that they mean well. I think we owe it to one another to be specific in our criticisms, and to confine those criticisms to the acts, not to the character of our opponents. It's a rare, rare case in which we are faced with truly sociopathic opponents. The NIH says that maybe 1 in 100 people is a diagnosable sociopath. That's it. The rest of us are just doing the best we can.

Paranoia and conspiracy theories don't help. Nor are most of them plausible -- they assume that you could legitimately organize large numbers of sociopaths together in ways that would go undetected by the rest of us. I have a problem with that.

Instead, I think it's healthy to acknowledge that we live in an imperfect world, so we choose the best we can among imperfect options:

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried," said Winston Churchill.

Free markets are terrible (the invisible hand forces us to work when we don't want to, and unequally distributes the rewards of that work)...except when you consider how miserably Communism, feudalism, Marxism/Leninism, mercantilism, and all of the other forms of economics have worked.

Speaking more directly to the comments made following my shows this past week:

The Federal Reserve System relies on human beings to make enormous assumptions based upon awfully imperfect data and a still-evolving understanding of economics. That's terrible...but it's a whole lot better than handing the monetary printing press directly to the government, or adopting a monetary standard based on something as capricious as the gold standard, or hoping that arbitrary currency management a la Bitcoins will keep us afloat.

The two-party system in American politics is sclerotic and contentious...but if we think that the candidate with the most votes should get the job, and that the majority should rule in a legislature, then a two-party system is mathematically inevitable. And it's really no different from a multi-party system...we just form our coalitions within the parties before the election, rather than after the votes have been cast.

There's maturity in accepting imperfection -- in assuming that we're all trying to do our best in an imperfect world. That makes it incumbent upon us to make the case for improving what we have, not for disparaging the very character of our opponents.

We can always do better, but if each of us rewards extreme talk, outrageous claims, and cartoonish lampooning of our opponents, then we waste valuable time that could be spent improving our imperfect world.

China aims lowerThe government is hoping for a 7.5% rate of economic growth in 2014. They were hoping for 8% in 2013. The new target would still be a rapid rate of expansion, but half of a percentage point is a lot to shave off expectations.

Contagious arrogance in Silicon Valley?Clever people figuring out technical problems shouldn't mistake themselves for great philosophers. There's a big mistake to be made in confusing a particular type of technical skill (coding/programming/hacking) with deeper wisdom. It's the kind of mistake that causes us to let older people think they're stupid for not knowing how to navigate Facebook and let younger people think they're creating a whole new world via hashtags and Snapchat. Nobody should have thought themselves stupid fifty years ago because they didn't know how to operate a Linotype press, and nobody should prematurely dismiss themselves today because they can't program an iPhone app.

British plan to block porn with filters goes a little farther than thatWhen people trust their government to nanny them into "safety" online, they're going to find that the nanny has a tsk-tsk attitude about a lot more than just some dirty pictures. When you're in a democracy, even when you deputize other people to make decisions on your behalf, they're only deputies. You're ultimately responsible for the conclusions. It's just like dealing with your doctor: You may not have a medical degree, but you have to retain the good sense to know whether to act upon the recommendations you receive -- and when to seek a second opinion.

Facebook joins the S&P 500 IndexA couple of observations on this event: First, do the people who wring their hands over the (false) impression that "Nobody makes anything in America anymore" think that the rise of services like Facebook is a bad alternative to people building widgets? Separately, from an investor's standpoint, it's hard not to worry about those who put their hard-earned money into investments in companies like Facebook. Facebook succeeds only because of a herd mentality. Sure, it goes by the more impressive name of the "network effect", but the bottom line is that it only works if everyone wants in and agrees that it's working. The moment public opinion starts to shift away from the site -- perhaps their new video ads become just too intrusive, or the terms of service get just too onerous, or maybe Facebook just ceases to be cool (like what happened to MySpace) -- that's the moment the company is no longer valuable. There's no institutional inertia keeping the site above water, and the moment it starts to slip, the negative feedback loop that results will kill the site.